Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Government



What's happening in Myanmar's civil war as military holds elections?

Al Jazeera

What's happening in Myanmar's civil war as military holds elections? Voters in parts of Myanmar are heading to the polls on Sunday for an election that critics view as a bid by the country's generals to legitimise military rule, nearly five years after they overthrew the government of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The multi-phased election is unfolding amid a raging civil war, with ethnic armed groups and opposition militias fighting the military for control of vast stretches of territory, stretching from the borderlands with Bangladesh and India in the west, across the central plains, to the frontiers with China and Thailand in the north and east. Another third will be covered during a second and third phase in January, while voting has been cancelled altogether in the remainder. Fighting, including air raids and arson, has intensified in several areas.


Sim2Real-Fire: A Multi-modal Simulation Dataset for Forecast and Backtracking of Real-world Forest Fire

Neural Information Processing Systems

We prepare 1K real-world wildfire scenarios for testing the AI models. We also propose a deep transformer, S2R-FireTr, which excels in considering the multi-modal environmental information for forecasting and backtracking the wildfire.


From shrimp Jesus to erotic tractors: how viral AI slop took over the internet

The Guardian

Clockwise from top left: Shrimp Jesus, Nayib Bukele, Justin Bieber and Super Cat League. Clockwise from top left: Shrimp Jesus, Nayib Bukele, Justin Bieber and Super Cat League. In the algorithm-driven economy of 2025, one man's shrimp Jesus is another man's side hustle. AI slop - the low-quality, surreal content flooding social media platforms, designed to farm views - is a phenomenon, some would say the phenomenon of the 2024 and 2025 internet. Merriam-Webster's word of the year this year is "slop", referring exclusively to the internet variety.





Zelenskyy says Ukraine, ahead of Trump meeting, is 'willing to do whatever it takes' to end war with Russia

FOX News

Kyiv faces massive Russian drone and missile attack as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy prepares to meet President Donald Trump in Florida on Sunday.


DoorDash launches Zesty, an AI app for finding local food

FOX News

DoorDash launches Zesty, an AI-powered social app that helps users find local restaurants through conversational chatbot recommendations in San Francisco Bay Area and New York.


'It brings you closer to the natural world': the rise of the Merlin birdsong identifying app

The Guardian

'It brings you closer to the natural world': the rise of the Merlin birdsong identifying app W hen Natasha Walter first became curious about the birds around her, she recorded their songs on her phone and arduously tried to match each song with online recordings. After a friend recommended Merlin Bird ID, a free app, she tried it in her London garden and was delighted to discover the birds she assumed were female blackbirds - "this is how bad a birder I was" - were actually song thrushes and mistle thrushes. "I'm obsessed with Merlin - it's wonderful and it's been a joy to me," says Walter, a writer and human rights activist. "This is what AI and machine-learning have been invented for. Merlin is having a moment. The app, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York, which listens for birdsong and identifies the species singing, has been downloaded 33m times, in 240 countries and territories around the world. Britain has the second highest total number of users - more than 1.5 million in 2024, an 88% increase from 2023. Every month, there has been a 30% increase in new users of the app, whose sound identification function was launched in 2021. Merlin has been trained to identify the songs of more than 1,300 species around the world, with more birds added twice a year. Different songs make distinct patterns on spectrograms and Merlin is trained to recognise these different shapes and attribute them to a species. For latecomers to birding, or those lacking a knowledgeable friend, the app has become their teacher. "My fear at first was I wouldn't actually learn because I'm outsourcing my understanding of birds to this app," says Walter. "But that hasn't come to pass.